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Review: A journey to Earth's companion

25 April 1992

By NIGEL HENBEST

Atlas of the Moon by Antonin Rakl, Hamlyn, pp 224, £19.99

‘It’s just like flying over the Moon’s surface,’ gasped a member of
my evening class when I first showed her the Moon through a moderately large
telescope. She – like most of the others – was disappointed with the telescope’s-eye
view of the planets and nebulae, as compared to spacecraft images and professional
long-exposure photographs. But the Moon always shows more than you expect
– to the extent it is easy to get lost in a telescopic flight over the lunar
surface. That’s why I have welcomed this new Atlas of the Moon to my bookshelves.

Most of the atlas, naturally, is devoted to detailed maps of the Moon’s
surface as seen from the Earth. The lunar features are mapped at a scale
of 1 to 2 400 000 and the resulting 1.5-metre diameter Moon is shown in
the form of 76 separate maps. These alone make the book a must for anyone
with a small or moderate telescope.

But Antonin Rakl, director of the Prague Planetarium, has provided much
more. Facing each map is a description of the depicted craters, hills and
‘seas’, complete with a mini-biography of the people immortalised in the
Moon’s surface features.

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Rakl includes an excellent account of the Moon’s orbit, its phases and
its changing position in the sky – aspects that always puzzle the non-astronomer
and yet are rarely explained well in popular books. If you’ve ever wondered
about the formation of the Moon, where the craters came from and who named
them, how to photograph the Moon or when the next lunar eclipse will occur
– that’s all here too. The real lunar buff will find all he or she ever
needs, with tables of co-longitude rubbing shoulders with maps of the libration
zones.

And I know that I’ll never get lost again as I fly my friends and pupils
over the surface of our neighbour in space.